Slashdot Mirror
Swedish Teleco Firms Looking Into Block VoIP Claiming Losses In Earnings
An anonymous reader writes "Telia, a Swedish telecommunications company, is now looking into possible solutions to block free VoIP services like Skype and Vibr, claiming the losses are beginning to take its toll on the total earnings. Critics are saying the companies have wrongly implemented outdated pricing models, and the act could threaten net transparency and Independence. A new report from regulators of the European phone market shows that more and more telecommunications companies will block their subscribers from using free services. The European Commission is investigating whether it is possible to prohibit the blocking of legal services online."
Why is it that when companies managed to reach a nice cushioned position they complain when the rules of the game change? this does not make sense to me.
You had all this time to profit and INNOVATE. Why not start your own VOIP service? instead, like some retarded dictator you want to block progress.
Innovate or die.
In the Netherlands, the largest telco (KPN) was also going to do this... then parliament rushed through a net neutrality law that forbids deep packet inspection and blocking specific traffic and the telcos backed off quickly. Now they can only charge by amount of data and speed. Maybe the Swedish will get lucky too now.
This sounds just like the music and movie business when they were trying to resist the changes in technology instead of embracing it.
We know how that worked out.
Maybe the telecom people should start reading the news?
These telecommunications companies are little more than parasites. They don't ENABLE anything on their own. First, they leverage all kinds of free subsidies (your tax dollars) to build their networks. Then, they wrangle out of taxes by taking business deductions, usually paying their worthless CEO's and other senior executives obscene amount of money for doing exactly what? Taking credit for the INternet and its associated benefits to technology, even as they choke off the benefits of those technologies.
What's even more breathtaking is that its tax money (made from our tax dollars, earned by the sweat of our ever-longer work days) that actually *paid* for their infrastructure.
Last, the thing that really amps me up about stuff like this is that telecommunications companies and ISPs, etc. are essentially using technology that they didn't invent, to leverage YOUR and my communicative assets!
Communication was "free" until we began to find ways to increase it's speed, depth, and breadth. From the stone tablet, to the scribes, to the early offset printers (and print distributors), to the Internet and its multifarious ways of data and information transmission, certain folks have found a way to horde either the means to information production, or its transmission.
Guess what? That model isn't going to work anymore, not if we want a sustainable information ecology that is as diverse as possible.
Sorry, but these ISPs and telcos are little more than traitors to human advancement, masquerading as enablers. They want to suck us dry; they want all the benefits. They want tax breaks made by the policy makers that they buy every few years to build their infrastructures, and then they want us to pay them more, as if the tax breaks (which we ultimately pay for) and the infrastructure (which we also pay for), and the very source of communications that they leverage (you and me), isn't enough.
We need to start finding ways (I don't have the answers, just posing the possibility) to once and for all RID this world of these gatekeepers, because they are interested in keeping only one thing sustainable - their bank accounts. They could give a damn about whether the world is better serves by more transparent and facile communications technology. The Telco and ISP sector are, again, traitors to human growth and development. We need to find another way.
TeliaSonera is a telco that actually operates both in Finland and in Sweden, and they're planning to block people from using Skype for free on the Finnish side of things, too. Their plan is to allow you to buy Skype talk-time that then allows the service through until the time is up. Do notice that this is in *addition* to what one already has to pay for Skype credits, so this has understandably created quite some negative commentary here and there.
The funny thing is that it's only TeliaSonera contemplating on doing this, all the others are more than fine with the situation as it is, and are even actively promoting unrestricted mobile broadbands.
...while the parliament voted on this (in favor) already, the Senate ("Eerste Kamer") can still vote it down. Although chances are slim, the (indirectly elected) Senate in the Netherlands proved in the past that their view of the country is sometimes substantially different from that of the directly elected representatives. Officially the Senate can only regard the law against the constitution, but recent developments made the senate a more political institute. Because currently there are critical negotiations going on to keep the government in office, there is no saying what will be decided in that meeting room that affects ongoing legislation, including any Senate decisions. ( https://www.bof.nl/2012/03/05/stemming-eerste-kamer-telecommunicatiewet-uitgesteld/ in Dutch and https://www.bof.nl/2011/06/22/press-release-%E2%80%93-the-netherlands-first-country-in-europe-to-launch-net-neutrality/ on the original law in English)
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
You seems to think that the telecommunication industry is a free market. It is not. It provides vital infrastructure which means that it's, and should be, heavily subsidized and regulated.
Not really angry, more like depressed. The winters are long, cold, and dark.
It is not helped by the fact that Swedes are notoriously uncommitted in their relationships, resulting in one of the highest, if not the highest percentage of 1-person households and single-parent families on the planet. Stockholm is littered with foreigners who married Swedes, moved here, then got dumped a few years later ("Ah well, this is our third argument this year, it's too much trouble to work out, I'm just divorcing you instead"--I shit you not, this actually happened to a friend of mine) and they wind up staying on so they can see their kids. And many of these ex-pats seem to spend most of their time, when not at work or visiting the kids, getting drunk and/or drug-fucked.
Don't get me wrong, I've lived here for nearly 5 years. As a resident and as a worker, I've been treated extremely well, and I'm very grateful for this. But I am really glad I met someone who's also not from here, instead of trying to hook up with a Swedish girl.
And it can be a beautiful country (especially in the summer, when it never really gets dark), and some Swedes are actually quite warm and friendly. But it's also true that about 20% of my neighbours in this building are single, live alone, don't go out much, and seem to have few if any visitors.
It's a bit sad. And if you are at all prone to depression, it can be a real struggle to make it through the winter here. This comes from one who knows all too well.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Disclaimer: I used to work for a telco, and was close to the C-level, so some actual business insight might be included, as long as supplies last, some assembly required.
The problem the telcos are trying to solve is twofold, especially for the old and large (often ex-government) ones.
The economic problem is that they have massive amounts of hardware, space and other investments tied up into POTS systems. Putting up the whole IP infrastructure wasn't cheap either, and now one of them is destroying the other. That's like having two cars and then your wife leaves - there's simply too much hardware in your garage you don't need. If you can't get rid of it, you will find yourself trying to use both, convincing yourself that one is better for city driving while the other is better for hauling stuff or long-distance or whatever. But the simple fact is that you simply don't like going perfectly good stuff to waste.
The other problem is pricing. Internet access was initially sold as an add-on, to gain more customers. The price point was designed for that case. Also, after privatisation, many countries in Europe entered a price-war amongst the telcos, driving prices down to a level that only few could sustain for long. Now they are at that point, usage patterns have long since changed with IP traffic being orders of magnitude higher, but they can't raise the prices because that would mean losing customers to the competition. And customers mean everything, because this is one of the businesses where the big honcho monkeys believe that only the top players can compete in the long run, so losing customers is the direct route for the CEO to lose his job. Not because of any actual facts, even if he keeps the company profitable, but because the big shareholders have all subscribed to a mantra that is accepted at face value.
All the throttling and filtering and bla that is being discussed is because during the land-grab phase of getting as many customers as possible, and Internet access being one big weapon in that, they basically allowed marketing to dig them into a very deep hole with its promises of unlimited high-speed access for almost no money.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org